“ZFS will be supported in Debian Squeeze using the official installer. This means that Debian Squeeze will be one of the first GNU distributions to support ZFS. In fact, even though ZFS support didn’t make it to Debian-Installer beta1 by the time it was released, it is now available in the netboot images (this happens because netboot images fetch newer installer components from the internet).”
While it was very rough last time I checked it’s good to see Debian supports such a wide variety of kernels. Yes 2, to be exact. That twice as much as most !
I think that is cool.
I’ve been following the development closely and it seems like a lot of work went into it.
Thank you for that.
No, 3 to be more exact: Linux, kFreeBSD and the Hurd.
Edited 2010-12-01 13:41 UTC
Hurd is not declared as officially supported by Debian.
They provide installable iso images so it is supported.
I forgot NetBSD BTW. That’s 5 supported kernels.
For a second there I thought Debian somehow managed to get ZFS support in their traditional distro at the last minute–which would have been shocking (not to mention pretty cool). But it turns out that it’s for the kFreeBSD variant, which is not surprising at all–the FreeBSD kernel does support ZFS after all. Can’t wait to try their FreeBSD-based variant, though. I have yet to have luck running it in VirtualBox, don’t know if the latest round of images and VirtualBox change that.
Don’t forget Nexenta, aka. GNU/Solaris
Well, they say, Nexenta did not start out from a GNU-distribution, but just included a few GNU utilities from Debian. For example it uses the libc from Solaris if I understand correctly.
Finally we have an answer to the question “But why would your use Debian GNU/kFreeBSD in favor of Debian GNU/Linux?” Well, now all of you ZFS fans have a reason.
But… wasn’t it obvious that, being based on the FreeBSD kernel, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD would inherit support for ZFS? I’m not surprised at all by this “news” that ZFS is supported in their kFreeBSD-based distro. What I *am* surprised about is that it apparently wasn’t already supported a while ago.
The real “news” is that the kFreeBSD variant is now supported by the official Debian installer, and is now considered “fully supported by Debian”.
Not that ZFS is now available.
Don’t forget access to PF and IPFW. And, one would hope anyway, GEOM.
Unfortunately, they put the GNU userland on top.
There’s just so many things done better in the BSD userland (like ifconfig, vmstat -i, bsdtar, nc, a bunch more I can’t think of right now but that irritate me to no end when I try to access them on Linux systems).
And my university’s FreeBSD machines can’t even run top properly (no output, sole thing to do is Ctl+C) and take ages to boot as soon as there’s a single small package update because they absolutely have to do that at boot time.
Not to mention that everything slows down to death when you’re running out of disk quota, even though there’s still plenty of RAM available.
I’m sure that a properly configured BSD does not have these issues, what I’m trying to say is that maybe your issues with Linux do not come from Linux software as a whole, and you’d find a properly configured Linux system more interesting.
Edited 2010-12-03 13:58 UTC
Uh, no, packages are not “updated” at boot time. Nor are they installed at boot time. The only OS I know of that does that is Windows Vista/7.
“Properly configured” has nothing to do with GNU ifconfig missing options that FreeBSD ifconfig has, and requiring you to use a slew of binaries to do the same (ifconfig, ip, wiconfig, iwconfig, ethtool, miitool, etc). That’s a defect in the ifconfig binary.
Same for vmstat. Same for gstat. Same for tar. Same for most of the BSD binaries — they are just more featureful and easier to use than the Linux ones.
Just about daily, I go to do something on a Linux station, and find that I can’t do it as easily as on a FreeBSD station.
and so most people have it the other way around… so what’s your point? windows is better because it’s a windowsadmin who dislikes linux?
if it were all that great, why don’t we see so many on the floor?
Perhaps for some of those utilities this is true, though I do not necessarily agree, but you can’t argue in any meaningful way that BSD find is more featureful than GNU find. And, frankly, I use find a lot more often thatn vmstat or non-trivial tar usage.
I couldn’t wait, I decided to try it. Installation was long and I had to switch mirrors twice to get one that works properly. Upon first impression, it’s exactly the same as the Linux version. But on the first boot, after clicking my name and entering my password, I was greeted to a never-ending “busy” cursor (as if it were trying to authenticate, when in reality this should’ve been done almost instantly).
Switched to another virtual terminal and entered a command to reboot. System rebooted, I logged in (successfully this time) and I clicked around a bit. Opened Epiphany, which said it couldn’t access the default page, which was http://www.debian.org. Did a ping test to google.com to see if the network was set up properly–it worked. So I tried opening debian.org in Iceweasel, and it worked. Went back to trying to access debian.org in Epiphany–no luck. Ironically, I checked Google in Epiphany, and it did work–but it still refused to work in Epiphany. I tried going to distrowatch.com in Iceweasel–program crashed. Somewhere along the line Epiphany crashed too.
Left the computer alone for a minute to come to another machine and start typing this. Just went back and moved the mouse–instantly the screen turned black and told me to enter my password. Did that–but I think I typed it wrong, either way it screwed up again. It’s now proudly displaying the word “Checking” and refusing to either remove the screensaver or ask for me to re-enter it.
Wow. I really hope these bugs are fixed before the final version is released. I would say it’s pretty much unusable in its current state, with program crashes, authentication problems, etc. It feels very slow, too (installed on UFS). Oh well, I guess I’ll wipe it and install something else.
Update: The screensaver finally went off and it took a while but the desktop finally reappeared (during which for several seconds the mouse was extremely choppy). Apparently I did type the password right, but still… who knows WTF it was doing all that time.
Edited 2010-12-01 20:54 UTC
Unfortunately you were mislead into thinking kFreeBSD was any kind of stable. Lower your expectations. It is a test bench, not a desktop.
Being frozen and nearly ready for a “stable” release, it sure seemed like it was about time it started to become stable. Usually when a Debian stable is released, it *is* stable, and they’re trying to get kFreeBSD officially released for 6.0–and it’s frozen. Yeah, apparently I was wrong. Unless they fix a lot of bugs and work on both the stability and performance of the distro, I really don’t know how Debian plans to get kFreeBSD ready for its first release, it just seems pretty far behind.
It’s ironic that I was modded down. Did people never try Debian kFreeBSD for themselves, and are just modding down based on the fact that they’re Debian fans and apparently can’t stand to hear anything bad about Debian? Just stating the facts–that stuff really did happen, and it seemed to be in rapid-fire succession (ie. all within 15-20 minutes or so). Not a very pleasant experience. If you don’t believe it… try it yourself. You might be surprised. I definitely was.
I tried the testing version of the Linux version of Debian 6 quite a while back (before the freeze), and it ran pretty good by comparison.
I thought debian was one of those distros that only ships free software. ZFS is NOT free. Sun and NetApp are still fighting over the patents in court. If NetApp wins, the source code Sun put out under open source will be tainted.
You’re out of date. It’s been settled:
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/industrynews/article.php/3902…
There is no such thing as a patented software. Patents cover methods and software patents are almost all trivial methods. Technically every single software violates hundreds of patents. ZFS is no more patented than vfat (See Microsoft vs TomTom litigation) or any other file system.